Cloud Adoption: 4 Human Costs

Moving to the cloud imposes changes on your IT workforce. Think in terms of changed expectations, education, migration and maintenance.

Just a few short decades ago, the most expensive IT resources were computers, and human operators were interchangeable. Now the roles are reversed -- technology assets have become a commodity while organizations place a premium on people.

To that end, the adoption of cloud computing brings with it a series of changes that directly impact the IT workforce. Failing to account for those changes can reduce the value of the cloud and increase IT costs and dysfunction. There are at least four major areas of human cost to assess when planning a cloud strategy and selecting a cloud provider.

No. 1: Cost Of Changed Expectations

Employees aren't rubes when it comes to the cloud. Sure, most people can't differentiate software-as-a-service from platform-as-a-service, but the recent consumerization-of-IT phenomenon has reset expectations. Most people regularly use cloud-based email clients, collaboration tools and even business apps. They've come to expect a new class of services for their digital consumption, and those expectations will be present for any cloud initiative your company starts.

Developers will expect more sophisticated deployments, project teams will expect easier acquisition of environments, and end users will expect their systems to go live faster.

As a result of these expectations, organizations face human costs in a range of areas. What must change? IT organizations must streamline server requisition and approval processes. They must update service catalogs. They may have to update configuration management systems, as well as retool finance systems and processes to move toward IT-as-a-service.

IT operations will see a (major) uptick in requests for temporary environments. One of the transformational aspects of cloud computing is the ease by which you can stand up servers. So once it becomes "easy" to get cloud servers, expect skyrocketing demand for environments to test new software releases, perform proof-of-concepts, execute performance testing or host training instances. Without proper planning, these demands can overwhelm IT organizations already stretched thin.

Fear not. There are ways to prepare for these new expectations. Start small by offering a few new services in the catalog, and constantly iterate over the new processes until you find the right balance between compliance with organizational standards and the necessity to think of service delivery in a new way. Embrace the concept of chargebacks for cloud services. Empower departments to provision (and pay for!) resources as they see fit.

The IT operations team will still have to play a role in maintaining these systems (see point No. 4 below), but you can ease the burden by encouraging a decentralized self-service culture. Cloud computing may be met with great excitement within your organization, but without setting expectations properly, you may struggle to deliver services in the way users hope for.

How can cloud providers help? Consider asking them for case studies on how other customers have dealt with the change management aspect of cloud programs. Make sure that your provider has the ability to deliver per-department invoices and billing so that you don't incur extra overhead parsing a single invoice and trying to dole out expenses.

No. 2: Cost Of Educating Staff

Cloud computing is truly a new model of planning and consuming technology resources, and you'll likely buy these resources from a provider that's not already entrenched in the IT landscape. While there may be resistance to this model by those whose roles will change as a result, the vast majority of cloud initiatives are led by IT organizations, and they want those efforts to succeed.

Don't underestimate the cost of retraining your technical staffers. They may have to learn a new platform that looks and feels like nothing in the data center today. Operations and architecture teams must learn and apply key deployment patterns that are vital to pushing highly available systems to the cloud. Senior staffers should all be trained to recognize the scenarios where "cloud" is the best fit so that they only deploy applications that can add value by running in the cloud.

It's very likely that staff assignments will change, as there's less of a need for physical infrastructure experts and "assembly line" server builders who only do one piece of the provisioning process. All of this means that to create a higher probability of success for your cloud program, you must plan a comprehensive training effort that targets each affected party.

How can you keep the cost of planning and training down and not paralyze your staff in the run-up to your cloud deployment? Find eager members of the architecture, development, operations, project management and business analysis teams and form a small team to evangelize their knowledge to the rest of the organization.

Focus heavily on "gatekeeper" roles such as architecture and operations so that they can keep unsuitable applications from ever reaching the cloud. Have the architecture team revamp existing reference architecture models so that each department can see where cloud environments fit in the overall IT landscape. Finally, make sure that operations, architecture and development teams are trained and ready for the new reality of security, data storage and integration in the cloud.

Cloud providers can help reduce this human cost. Check to see if your provider has an extensive set of whitepapers on how its cloud works. See if it has a professional services organization that can do training for specific roles. And while it may not seem important, verify that your cloud provider provides a logical, well-organized user interface, which will go a long way to reducing the amount of upfront training needed and ease the transition from the existing, familiar toolset.

Nice article, Jared. I am finding similar patterns inhow changes in technology are impacting IT, specifically its need to adapt andupdate the way it operates and collaborates with the rest of the organization.I fully agree that the consumerization-of-IT has reset IT expectations; Irecently wrote a blog post on the topic, which looks at the IT department fromthe perspective of becoming a profit center GÇô and whether or not this is aviable option. If youGÇÖre interested, it can be found here: http://www.autotask.com/main-p...

IT staffs in general are quite flexible and ready to learn new things when they associate that learning with survival. And it's occurred to many that mastering some aspect of cloud computing is a good survival tactic. I remember the enthusiasm with which Java was received as the age of the Internet dawned. Staffers were actively looking for some way to adjust to and become part of that age; Java took the data center by storm. But which type of cloud are we worrying about here? I think the main challenge is the drastic change of thinking associated with infrastructure as a service, where end users are allowed to self provision. IT should manage that process,but by implementing charge-back, responsibility for end user systems becomes a shared thing rather than just IT saying thumbs up or thumbs down.The IT/line of business interaction becomes more involved, more interactive.

This article could use a bit more context on the style of cloud addressed. The reason SaaS is the type of cloud that many are interested in is that the vendor maintains and upgrades the servers and compute capacity behind the service. What's more, it maintains and upgrades the app, which is probably the more time- and cost-intensive demand than keeping servers up and running.

Software as a service is the clear No. 1 way enterprises consume cloud. InformationWeek's SaaS Innovation Survey reveals three tips to get the most from SaaS: Make it a popularity contest. Have an escape plan. And remember that identity is the new perimeter.